InVision takes on Adobe with the introduction of Studio

InVision, the collaborative prototyping tool used by more 3 million people, has been around since 2011. But today, InVision is taking on the full stack with the announcement of its own Photoshop competitor.

InVision’s new Studio design tool goes toe-to-toe with Adobe Photoshop and Sketch, offering designers a way to both create and edit their work and then seamlessly send it into the InVision cloud for collaboration.

Adobe says that over 90 percent of the world’s creative professionals use Adobe, with Creative Cloud making representing more than 50 percent of the company’s value. And InVision wants to change that.

For the past few years, InVision has grown its customer base by acting as a layer that sits on top of design tools. Designers using Photoshop or Sketch can upload their screens to InVision and add in all the animations and transitions that would be functional on a live website. They can then share that prototype with peers, clients, and/or whomever else is involved in the project and receive feedback.

But founder and CEO Clark Valberg explained to TechCrunch that he constantly hears from customers just how broken the workflow is before anyone ever uploads to InVision.

He said that Photoshop was meant for photo editing, but has become a necessity for product designers, whose job has evolved rapidly over the last decade. Meanwhile, “Sketch is a reductionist version of Photoshop, baked down to just what you need to draw stuff on a screen,” said Valberg.

Beyond that, designers often need to use a few more tools to get their job done, including using a tool for animation, one for asset source management, and hop back and forth between them all to complete would-be simple tasks.

That’s where Studio comes in.

Studio takes on the familiarity of traditional design tools like Photoshop and Sketch, but is built specifically with the modern designer’s workflow in mind, says Valberg.

The advanced animation you find on InVision is now available in Studio on the design level, letting designers bring life to static screens without writing code. The new tool is also with a responsive design feature, letting designers automatically check their screens on multiple screen sizes without re-creating them for each different device that customers might be using.

Because designers are working collaboratively at companies like Airbnb, Spotify and Twitter, Studio will offer shared design systems where assets, hex codes, and other components of design are available from within the tool.

And, obviously, Studio will let users upload their content instantly to the InVision Cloud for collaboration across the organization and beyond.

But what’s more interesting, and perhaps far more ambitious than competition with Adobe, is that InVision wants Studio to have its own app store and asset store, so developers and designers can build products and offer designs within the tool itself.

InVision isn’t ready to announce official pricing as the product won’t be publicly available until January, but Valberg said he wants Studio to be as disruptively priced as possible, and that InVision customers should be able to use the product for free.

This marks InVision’s first foray into vertical integration. The company has raised a total of $135 million.